Prior art systems in many cases require other specialized pieces of hardware in addition to the portable device and/or require there to be person in the loop that makes judgments about the data being received. Additionally many of those other systems merely receive alerts or updates from some other sources of data or send a picture or text to a 3rd party to create an alert. Other apps like the WAZE application (hereinafter “app”) are used in a crowd-sourced fashion to avoid public safety personnel (e.g., circumvent traffic cameras, radar checks, etc.) or to get basic situational awareness.
However, the WAZE app simply sends data collected by users to a public website for viewing by other users. The WAZE app does not include any features where a server analyzes the data and sends specific alerts/commands to individual users to create enhanced situational awareness and/or to provide instructions.
Further, there exists a need to generate public health data by and from the public to the public in a time-sensitive fashion. Crowd-sourced Apps and services PatientsLikeMe, and 23 and Me focus on serving individuals in a peer-to-peer way but they do not serve the larger public good in a many-to-many or one-to-many manner. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) all publish warnings and bulletins but all based on scientific field collected data not near-real-time crowd sourced data that can be updated by users continuously.